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This week I’m posting the five steps I take when I help a creator with their Kickstarter campaign. In this post, I’m covering Step 4: Asking For Help. This post talks about the important, and difficult, step of asking for help.

Ask For Help

Asking for help is hard. Creators generally want the work to speak for itself, and to be able to do everything on their own. This is totally understandable. We all want to be self sufficent. But when your campaign hits a snag, it’s time to ask for help.

This doesn’t mean:

Spam famous people for retweets! That is obnoxious and generally doesn’t work.

This means:

Update your audience, tell them how much you appreciate their support, and tell them what THEY can do to help the campaign be a success. Directly ask supporters to reach out to their own social networks and spread the word about your project. Your supporters are part of your marketing team, so give them the tools to do a good job. Give them access to images and video that will help them share information about the campaign.

Reaching out to trusted friends and mentors about your campaign, and asking them for frank feedback about what you might be doing wrong, and what you could do better. This means calling in those favors you’ve been saving up.

This means hiring a graphic designer, video maker, or other professional to polish your campaign so that it can make a better impression.

This means reaching out to the media and identifying outlets that might be interested in your campaign and sending them a pitch for an article or an interview.

This means admitting, to yourself, and to the people that matter that something has gone wrong and that you need help to fix it.

Asking for help is hard, but it can be an important part of rescuing a sinking campaign.